The Words Better Be the Right Ones

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason -- if the words are in any way blurred -- the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing “weak specification.”

RAYMOND CARVER

You Have to Find Your Own Shtick

You have to find your own shtick. A Picasso always looks like Picasso painted it. Hemingway always sounds like Hemingway. A Beethoven symphony always sounds like a Beethoven symphony. Part of being a master is learning how to sing in nobody else's voice but your own.

HUGH MacLEOD

A Good Style Comes From Lack of Pretentiousness

A good style comes primarily from lack of pretentiousness, and what is pretentious changes from year to year from day to day from minute to minute. We must be ever more careful. A man does not get old because he nears death; a man gets old because he can no longer see the false from the good.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Telling Writers to Avoid the Passive Is Bad Advice

Telling writers to avoid the passive is bad advice. Linguistic research has shown that the passive construction has a number of indispensable functions because of the way it engages a reader’s attention and memory. A skilled writer should know what those functions are and push back against copy editors who, under the influence of grammatically naïve style guides, blue-pencil every passive construction they spot into an active one.

STEVEN PINKER

Ideas Are Not the Best Subject Matter for Fiction

Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-product, something the reader himself is led to formulate after watching the story unfold. The ideas, the generalizations, ought to be implicit in the selection and arrangement of the people and places and actions. They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark.

WALLACE STEGNER

Characters Come Into Being Word by Word

At the beginning, I have next to nothing: an image, a situation, maybe a phrase. Characters come into being word by word. If a finished character is an edifice, an unwritten character is very nearly a vacuum.

ANN PACKER

Failure is Part of It

Failure is part of it. You will be rejected dozens and dozens of times. The best way to prepare for it is to have something else in the works by the time the rejection letter arrives. Invest your hope in the next project. Learning to cope with rejection is a good trait to develop.

PO BRONSON

Fiction Is An Inefficient Vehicle for Moralizing

Fiction is an inefficient and insincere vehicle for moralizing. If an author’s motive is to impart a lesson, he would be better off writing a manifesto or publishing a pamphlet and distributing it free on the subway. Novels are, by their very nature, slow. It takes a long time to read a book — longer than looking at a painting or listening to a song. And of course writing one takes even longer. If you are a person whose aim in life is to spread the gospel of good, writing about the inner lives of people who do not exist is a bad use of time.

ALICE GREGORY

Writing Is Like Spelunking

Writing is like spelunking, with a light on your hat. You keep going into different chambers until you find a chamber that seems to you to be the right one; you’re descending into dark and unknown territory and you can never see very far ahead.

TOBIAS WOLFF

The Process of Writing Can Be Magical

The process of writing can be magical — there are times when you step out of an upper-floor window and you just walk across thin air, and it’s absolute and utter happiness. Mostly, it’s a process of putting one word after another.

NEIL GAIMAN